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mmaney writes "As part of its 2009 open source best practices research, MindTouch asked C and VP level open source executives who they thought are the most influential people in the industry today. The list is ranked by the effect these individuals have had on the open source industry. Over 50 votes from executives in Europe and North America were cast. There were a few surprises from outside of the open source industry. Steve Ballmer got a mention because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact. Vivek Kundra was mentioned because of his contributions to the industry inside the US Federal Government. Notably absent, however, are any influential women."
Relatedly, Matt Asay (who is also on the list) writes about the decreased need for open-source evangelism, noting that several people on the list are there "not because they're open-source cheerleaders, but because they have helped vendors and customers alike understand how to get the most from open-source investments."

just a couple of days ago i heard somewhat known person in opensource community (and as it turns out, an extremely nice guy) comment on such a list - most likely the same one.he said something along the lines on "they just asked some guys with financial interest in all this, but who actually do not care or have any idea what open source or free software actually means, name somebody - so they just named each other".

This is fluff of the type I used to see in WIRED, PCWorld, etc years ago. It is corporate back-patting garbage, of little interest to nerds and real programmers and engineers, many of us still unemployed because the Republicans destroyed America's economy. This is made-up tripe... kings and commissars anointing themselves with badges and awards for pretending to care about those of us below them. The emperor has no clothes. The idea of real and tangible freedom still shines brighter and truer than these cor

It's funny that in occasion of this clueless survey, Matt Asay has taken yet another chance to show that he has been... peeing outside the recipient lately... His new blog piece is sort of the way to crown his recent series of bitter non-sense... I can't resist the need to link to Open Source is dead, long live Casino Open Source? [standardsandfreedom.net]...

From TFS: Steve Ballmer got a mention because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact.

What's so hard to understand? When Ballmer started mouthing off about open source it was probably the first time lots of people heard of it. Just because he wasn't influential in the way he would have liked doesn't mean he didn't have an influence. They aren't pretending that he's deliberately helping.

Definitely missed their mark. Seriously, look at the "mentions" - Steve Ballmer. Would really need to see the way they worded the survey to see how that name made the list.

Are you kidding?? Steve is a fantastic Linux asset. The 235 patents story must have made way more column inches in the IT media that the release of a new kernel or the launch of compiz ever could. Even publications that never carry open source stories would have reported on this. The Linux shopping spree and the subsequent full stop and panicked withdrawal alone I'm sure did more to publicise Linux and GPL3 than a bunch of full page adverts. It's kind of the same as when the music and movie industries seed

Exactly my thought. For example, how many people (not on/. which is *not* representative of the whole population) have heard of Shockley, Bardeen, Kilby et al. who invented transistors and ICs, which have had such a huge impact on life as we know it?

Although the article was very thin on details, I thought that it was worthwhile. It put a new spin on things because the list dealt with who was currently influential, rather than trotting out the old names that we've seen on lists like this for the last fifteen years. I realized after reading the article that I just don't care that much, though. Good thing they chose corporate types to put together this list, since they'll get a charge out of reading it.

Well, realistically, how much code can someone actually write? I think the most influential people are going to be those those who can corral and co-ordinate the efforts of disparate people to work together one one big project that no single person can handle alone. They maybe never even write code themselves.

Ultimately it can't not be about the business, because that's the whole purpose of running a business. If you're not serving the needs of what's generating income, you're not doing a very good job. But IT also needs to have backbone and say "you know what you want, we know what can be delivered". And IT often has to be those saying you have to invest today so you can keep generating income tomorrow too. But I've met far too many that deliver something that is technically correct and/or neat, yet completely

Speaking as a former Apple employee: so _that's_ why a bunch of senior engineers in the hardware devision were let go or put in such a horrible situation that they left. Apple isn't being that great to their engineers and is focusing more on how hard they can drive them to produce new products every 6 months.

a bunch of senior engineers in the hardware devision were let go or put in such a horrible situation that they left.

Don't know what you mean by "a bunch", butI heard that when Apple went from PPC to Intel, they let some ASIC engineers go since they didn't have to make their own motherboard chipsets anymore. Is that what you're referring to?

but unfortunately the Open Source community of programmers has been replaced by a conglomeration of companies who are exploiting Open Source as a tool to further sales.

Ha! If by replaced you mean added to. Companies selling open source software is a Good Thing. It means the open source movement has been successful. How is it exploitation?So we'll never see another programmer at the top of these charts like we did back when Linux was first emerging as a valid alternative to entrenched Unix systems.

Another laugh! Which "these charts" are you talking about? This whole article was written by a two-bit player selling collaboration software. Ever heard of them? I hadn't. This isn't even written by crappy journalists who don't know what they're talking about, it's written by crappy marketers who don't know what they're talking about.

Companies selling open source software is a Good Thing. It means the open source movement has been successful. How is it exploitation?

There's a difference?

(Actually, I did do a google "define:" check. The results were worded somewhat differently, but I couldn't pin down an actual difference in meaning. I do suspect that we're talking about different words used to "frame" an issue by different subcultures.)

I agree that there are mutiple definitions of the word exploit. I don't agree that they're used differently in different "subcultures". Exploit meaning to take advantage of unfairly is a commonly used definition that crosses culture, as does exploit meaning to utilize (exploit a natural resource). Like any other word with multiple definitions the context in which it's used is what determines which definition is accurate.

Arguing about semantics is irrelevant. It's fairly clear the GP was using the unfair

In most companies, executives who never program a line of code are recompensed at a higher rate than their programmers. This is because it is the business side of the company that matters the most. Understanding who the customers are, who the competition is, how to strategically position the company, and other non-code related things are far more important than the day to day coding that most of the engineering staff engages in.

Substitute cars for software. In terms of the automobile industry, the code (and their associated specs and unit tests, which were written by the programmers) would represent design, engineering, and manufacturing. Now let's try your thesis again:

Understanding who the customers are, who the competition is, how to strategically position the company, and related things are far more important than the day-to-day design, engineering, and manufacture of the automobiles.

(..) but unfortunately the Open Source community of programmers has been replaced by a conglomeration of companies who are exploiting Open Source as a tool to further sales.

And any true FOSS supporter should welcome that: whatever the motive of folks employing open source, as long as they do, they further general adoption of it.

Commercial exploitation of FOSS means incorporation into products, means equipment that adheres to standards (vs. closed protocols). It also means software reuse, less re-inventing of the wheel, and (ultimately) cheaper products because the manufacturer didn't waste money re-inventing those wheels. And products that are more valuable to end-users bec

Relatedly, Matt Asay (who is also on the list) writes about the decreased need for open-source evangelism

If anything, raving fanbois screaming that Microsoft is "teh suck" is doing more to hurt open source than help.

I'm a vegetarian. I don't preach to people about it. I don't need other people to follow my path to make me feel good about what I do but I always welcome those who are interested. I find that screaming at people for eating meat is annoying and counter productive. Instead I'd ha

Which is fine if all nobody else is logged in. As I noted in my post, I care about remote access where I do not have to worry about interfering with someone else who is using the machine, which is not something *VNC can give you in Windows XP. I cannot attest to the situation with Vista or Windows 7, but I would be willing to bet that, given the more restrictive licensing in those systems, this functionality is even more restricted.

I want to note there are a few who actually contribute code listed. BUT it's important to understand that this top influencers list was actually a byproduct of a survey conducted establishing best practices in open source sales and marketing. Hence the distinctly business slant.
This list of top influences has been so remarkably well received that we intend to do it every year. However, in the future survey we will include CTOs and VP of Engs in order to create two categories. Business/Law and engineering.
Thanks for the feedback. Please post additional suggestions to the post and we'll try out best to incorporate them.

Wow. You've completely missed the whole culture of open source. Your whole article assumes a completely different context. Top influencer's of what? Top influencer's of who? Business guys? Maybe.

What you seemed to have missed is that "Open Source" generally consists of the people doing the actual work writing the code, designing the infra-structure, etc. It isn't like a traditional business where the Big Business Boys are in charge and call all the shots. That's not to say it's completely grass root

as i mentioned before [slashdot.org], the list has been received less than favourably in opensource circles.the view has been that you have chosen people who actually do not help or even are really influential in opensource, just a club of some sociophats who try to get more money out of the opensource by twisting it.

i don't have a boilerplate advice for you - but maybe concentrating next time on people who actually believe and _do_ real free/opensource software would help somewhat.now what does that mean ? looking at peo

Here is one: Leslie Hawthorn. She organizes Google's Summer Of Code, which has brought thousands of students (myself included) in an active role of participating in various open source projects. It's an absurdly hard task to coordinate thousands of students and mentors each year, to make sure all information, payments, shirts,... are sent out in time, to organize the mentor summit, and meanwhile try to solve all problems that come up underway. She does it extremely well and I think the open source community can't thank her enough. I honestly don't think there's much more you could do to influence open source.

I would also nominate PJ at Groklaw, for applying FOSS principles and practices to IP law.

Yes, Pamela is to be congratulated. Groklaw's single main purpose is allowing the translation of a neurotypical legal system, for a largely autistic audience.

That isn't meant as a troll, either, so please don't interpret it as one. Even the neurotypicals themselves generally find their legal system virtually impossible to comprehend, so I often wonder how on Earth we are supposed to cope with it.

Hate to break it to you, but organizing thousands of developers is nothing new in open source. Look at the big Linux distros, and how their leaders keep everyone in line and organized. You think GSoC is difficult to organize? Try managing Debian or Fedora, where you have to deal not only with your own people and finances, but also with upstream maintainers and the weird decisions they make. GSoC involves keeping all the different, largely unrelated projects in line; a Linux distro supervisor needs to make sure that all the packages in the distro will play nicely with each other. Distro maintainers also have to deal with users, who sometimes make absurd demands and are insulted when they do not get what they want (e.g. the people who demand that Fedora ship with SELinux disabled by default).

Not to make Leslie Hawthorn's task seem easy, but I would hardly call her the most influential open source leader out there.

a Linux distro supervisor needs to make sure that all the packages in the distro will play nicely with each other

Can you describe your experience with Debian's supervisors and management team?

(Disclaimer, I have some personal experience with this exact topic. It is handled in an effective mostly-anarchistic way, without any "management overhead", which I doubt the fine article's writers and readers can comprehend.)

I think that "Open Source" means something different to me..maybe I'm getting older... Does the whole idea of "Open Source" has been kidnaped by the corporate *bs* and rebranded with a new background, meaning and of course, new corporate "heroes"?

Does the whole idea of "Open Source" has been kidnaped by the corporate *bs* and rebranded with a new background, meaning and of course, new corporate "heroes"?

Nah; it just means that the people who did this survey didn't bother talking to anyone who really knows what Open Source is or who might be influencing a lot of others right now. They talked to a bunch of top corporate management guys, who mostly have no knowledge of or interest in where their lowly workers are getting their ideas or tools. That's

"And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates."-- Deuteronomy, 6:6

Jordan Hubbard. He was the initial author of the ports system for FreeBSD. He was also, I believe, the leader of that project before going to work for Apple.

Marshall Kirk McKusick. Author of both the first and second filesystems for FreeBSD, and designer of the Beastie mascot.

Patrick Volkerding. He is the leader of the Slackware Linux project, which was the first Linux distribution I ever used, and still, I believe, the finest in existence.

William and Lynn Jolitz. The co-authors of the 386BSD project, and in that sense, Computer Science's answer to the Curies.

Bill Joy. Author of the original vi.

Bram Moolenaar. Founder and maintainer of the Vim project.

Gerard Beekmans. Founder of the Linux From Scratch project.

Linus Torvalds. I don't need to mention who Linus is. However, I'm also not mentioning him purely because it is politically correct to do so. I mention him here because I've looked through the code of his 0.1 Linux release. Linux might be a bloated horror now, but back then, it was poetry.

Bob Young, and Marc Ewing. The founders of Red Hat. Red Hat eventually abandoned the end user market for the enterprise sector, but they made a game try at creating an end user distribution first. Red Hat contributed a number of key programs to early Linux distributions, including the RPM package manager, and Anaconda hardware detection software. They also now largely fund the continued development of the GNU project.

Ulrich Drepper. I will admit that I think Glibc is a bloated mess, but Ulrich displayed courage in once drawing attention to the megalomania of Richard Stallman. For that, I admire him.

Daniel Robbins. Founder of both the Gentoo and Funtoo projects, and an awesome bash scripter.

Theo de Raadt. Leader of the OpenBSD project. Theo is an individual who understands what both the correct philosophy and methods are, behind developing software, and is not afraid to continue to follow said beliefs, irrespective of the project's detractors. His manner might, at times, emulate that of Erin Brockovich, but I still admire him despite that, and believe that his intelligence is matched only by his tenacity.

And now, the hall of shame:-

Richard Stallman. This is an individual who scarcely needs introduction on Slashdot, either; however I consider him the Magneto to Raymond's Xavier. The Free Software Foundation is the archetypical destructive cult, and Stallman has become as much a bane to Free and Open Source Software as he ever may have originally been a blessing. The savagery that I will likely be shown by his followers, for placing him here, will only further prove that point.

Bradley Kuhn. He has stated that his ideal is a scenario where the GPL is the only FOSS license in existence.

Ian Murdock. Founder of the Debian project, which is, after Stallman and his drone army, the single greatest source of emotional pain for me, where FOSS is concerned. His original intentions might have been good, but I continue to consider Debian a titanically bloated, excessively complex obscenity, in both technical and social terms. It is the worst Linux distributio

I find it very hard to disagree with your list. I am not completely sure that I'd put Ian Murdock on the second list - most of the things you dislike about Debian seem to have collected later and he's done some good work on OpenSolaris that makes up for Debian. Marshall Kirk McKusick and Bill Joy both deserve to be near the top of the list for their respective achievements.

One person I'd add is Keith Packard. He doesn't get much press coverage, but he is largely responsible for the fact that X.org is

I guess that you were modded insightful because you need to click "Read the rest of this comment" in order to read the incredibly nonsensical part of your post... Anyway, do notice that although "RMS is a zealot and an extremest that is a savage and a bane to Free and open source software" he and his likes have certainly not ever come close to show the sort of zealotry and biggotry in your post. I wonder if you are even conscious of the extremism you are showing by calling people "drones" or flaming debian

Now, I guess you could think "Wow! these guys must really be a great company since they have the TOP TWO OSS influencers on their board!". A less naive person might have some other thoughts on that.

This article is little more than marketing masquerading as news. It was written by the companies sales guy. The reason why nobody has ever heard of these people is that the article isn't about actual people of influence, it's an attempt to sell a product.

Maybe. But your article wasn't titled Most Influential Open Source Executives. It was Most Influential People. Or are you saying that only executives are people?

If only I had modpoints for the parent...: Vellmont is right on the money on the article's motivation. Someone (Roebot) hastes to make a sarcastic rebuttal. Vellmont answers saying "But your (emphasis mine) article wasn't titled...", Roebot replies with yet more sarcasm, without bothering to add a denial about the 'your article'.

He may yet not be the actual author, but the fact that he does not care to deny it tells me something about his mindset...

Excuse me? You are giving out the impression that your small company somehow managed to grab not one but two most influential people in the open source business. Sorry, but the odds are against you: it's Occam's razor you need to fight here, not tin foil hats. Now, I know you are saying this isn't just your opinion but a survey. There are two things that make this article still smell very, very fishy:

1. You do not say anything about the possible biases your research may have. Anyone with a clue will be able

..and the point of open source is a number of people offering their source code to everyone. These people are the source of "open source", and the names on that list don't resonate with that crowd, hence they are not influential. The list should include notable (and leading) contributors to such project as Firefox, Linux, Net/Open/FreeBSD, OpenOffice, SAMBA, Wine, OpenSolaris, etc. (I am sure I missed a lot of important OS projects, please do forgive me in advance).

It's just another case of epitomizing the managers over the engineers - yes, it's a cliche, but it fits. Managers just can't seem to be satisfied with raking in the most dough - they need the kick of fame, too, even though in the OS world they are the least relevant - remember, cathedral vs. bazaar.

Let us just have reality take over. How many women do you know that will "work" after work? None of my colleagues are willing or even think about work after 5. None of men, that stop work at 5 are ever promoted. The reason that women are out of the list, is because they "have better things to do in their lives". Like watching the next episode of some soap opera or do gardening. I am however sorry for those women that have to work double(and sacrifice double) to overcome the fact, that most of their "sisters

Well, thanks, but I don't see how my experience with NeXTSTEP and the Mac make me any kind of hero, let alone an "open source hero". I've given a little bit of code away in my time, but it's not like it's any kind of mission I'm on.

As for GnuStep, it's a nice try, but once Apple and NeXT merged and the danger of NeXTSTEP vanishing altogether was alleviated, that really took the wind out of GnuStep's sails. The Linux crowd doesn't care about it, and the Mac crowd doesn't need it.

they should be focusing on replicating the NeXT/Apple experience.

I have to disagree with you on that. Trying to match any existing system is shooting too low. I remember when Visix was very proud of bringing "the Mac level of UI to UNIX" back around 1987 or so. I interviewed with them, and told them that unless they were looking to substantially exceed what the Mac offered, they shouldn't bother.

What I'd love to see happen with the Linux desktop is some serious re-thinkng of how a UI should be done. Trying to make it like Windows is tragic, and trying to make it like the Mac is just never going to be good enough.

>> What I'd love to see happen with the Linux desktop is some serious re-thinkng of how a UI should be done.

Why? The UI is more or less a solved problem, sort of like the controls of a car. Yes there are some minor innovations here and there. Someone adds some taskbar effects or a nicer way of moving through open windows, or someone adds a steering wheel control for the radio. These little tweaks will go on for a long time, but the basic idea of a desktop is a solved problem, and doesn't need re-inventing. Just like the car, where our standard design is almost perfect for most people, and all of the radical attempts at revamping it have failed because they offer no significant advantage.

The desktop UI isn't going anywhere until we move away from our current interfaces. The next major step will happen when we're no longer tied to a keyboard/mouse combo. Until then why whinge about the state of the UI? It fits the application just fine.

If the mouse was never invented, EMACS (and vi) would still be one of the best interfaces. But the mouse was invented and things changed. I believe the grant parent had already covered this, by saying unless we are to drop the keyboard/mouse, dont expect a UI revamp.

I do believe that. And the last 20 years of UI design is evidence for me being right. There is incremental evolution, but all the radical concepts fell by the wayside. Good luck with that.

This is true. It also isn't good for development to be excessively radical. Radical development goes at a pace which does not allow human minds to be able to cope.

I still remain very adamantly convinced that the most effective form of user interface in existence, is made up of the group of text utilities that were devised during the 70s and early 80s. They work, they work well, and they also tend to work far more consistently and reliably than the newest GUI environments, as well.

You completely miss the point. Manual gearboxes are all almost the same since the 1920s. A choke is a tiny detail (my bike still has one). Manual steering is a tiny detail (how much effort does it take), and ABS doesn't affect the interface at all.

>> It doesn't scale well or at all to netbooks

Market proves you wrong. The first netbooks had customized interfaces with icon launchers and whatever. People didn't like it. Now almost every single netbook uses bone-stock windows.

"What I'd love to see happen with the Linux desktop is some serious re-thinkng of how a UI should be done."

Hear Hear! Yes, I too am a little disappointed that the "zenith" of Free Software seems to be cloning the look and feel of Windows, which is cloning the Mac, etc.

What about some real ground-breaking stuff - how about a marriage of GUI and Unix-y pipe goodness, where you could connect applications together in a GUI and have them do data flow type work - take the Unix filters approach one (or more) steps further?

What about getting RID of the file selector, and just using the normal file views + drag and drop to open and save files? Drag a file to your word processor, and it opens. Drag the tab from the word processor to a disk, and you save. Drag a section of a file, and you save that section. Drag that section to the desktop, and you save a cut buffer, and you can have as many cut buffers as you want.

Hell, why can't I just drag a file to a printer icon to print it? Why do I have to OPEN the file, then print it?

Let's look at the old OS/2 Workplace shell - let's make every file an object, with methods, selectable via drag or via right click.

Rather than using 3D just to view 2D windows in a glitzy way, let's try to do something meaningful with it.

Yes, some of the above ideas may not work out, but let's at least start exploring them and finding out WHICH ones don't work and which ones do?

Let's not let the "But people are used to the way Windows does things, and thus we cannot change anything away from that paradigm" ball-and-chain keep us from moving forward.

Why can't we tie man pages/info pages and other help into one source, so that we can have the advantages of both being able to search a global help database (apropos printing), being able to view the man pages for a program without running it (man lpr), AND still having those pages be context-linked into the programs?

how about a marriage of GUI and Unix-y pipe goodness, where you could connect applications together in a GUI and have them do data flow type work - take the Unix filters approach one (or more) steps further?

I think you'd like Apple's Quartz Composer app. It's visual data-flow system for generating motion graphics, and its diagram editor would be great for plugging UNIX pipes and filters together.

Why even make files a UI metaphor at all? I did a little experiment a few years ago. I got around twenty people, some computer scientists, some completely nontechnical, some from a scientific background but not directly related to computers, to define a file for me. Only two of them gave me the same definition, and they were from a UNIX background so defined a file as an untyped stream of bytes with a name associated with them. Almost half answered with something along the lines of 'I don't really know'. Then I asked people what a document was. There answers weren't all the same, but they were close and people were a lot more certain that they could define a document than a file.

A UNIX file is a nice abstraction for the OS to present to programmers, because it's simple to build complex things on top of it. It is a terrible abstraction to present to users. Try explaining to a user why a Word document can contain images in the file but an HTML document refers to images in an external file, so dragging one to a disk works fine and dragging the other to the disk loses all of the inline images some time and you'll see quite how bad an abstraction files are. NeXT-style bundles go a little way toward improving the situation, but not far enough.

I totally agree on the pipes concept. You should take a look at System Services on NeXT / OS X, which are a good step in the right direction. While streams of untyped bytes are fine for persistence, they are horrible for communication. Something trivial, like sorting the output of ls -l by file size (displayed in human-readable form) is insanely complicated on a UNIX shell relative to the complexity of what you are actually trying to achieve. If, rather than a set of lines of text, ls emitted an array of objects, then you would just sort them by the size attribute and pretty-print them. Depressingly, this was actually solved nicely in Smalltalk-76, where the Transcript window gave you exactly this kind of interaction.

Something trivial, like sorting the output of ls -l by file size (displayed in human-readable form) is insanely complicated on a UNIX shell relative to the complexity of what you are actually trying to achieve.

Sorry, no. I said in human-readable form, meaning with the sizes in B, KB, MB, or GB, depending on which is the most natural representation. You can get this output from ls with ls -h, but then you can't sort it with sort. You can sort it with awk, or you can use awk to convert put column two in human-readable form.

I just tried the command that you listed and it sorted by the link count of the file and displayed the sizes in disk allocation units (512 byte blocks on this system). So, you've created a

What about getting RID of the file selector, and just using the normal file views + drag and drop to open and save files? Drag a file to your word processor, and it opens. Drag the tab from the word processor to a disk, and you save. Drag a section of a file, and you save that section. Drag that section to the desktop, and you save a cut buffer, and you can have as many cut buffers as you want.

Most of these things have been in MacOS and/or Windows (and/or others, like OS/2) since the mid-90s, if not longe

True, but only in very limited ways. I just dragged a PDF file to my printer and it worked fine. The Acrobat program opened and closed visibly, but otherwise it just worked. I tried to drag a.cxx file to the printer (.cxx files are associated with Visual Studio on my system, as it is the only IDE on my system, even though I'm more like to compile a program with gcc and idit it with emacs) and I get message telling me that the program only supports printing to my default printer, and asking me if i want to

But these are limitations imposed by the applications, not the OS. OSes support what you want quite well, and have for a very long time, but if applications don't make use of those features, there's not much the OS can do about it.

"What I'd love to see happen with the Linux desktop is some serious re-thinkng of how a UI should be done."

Hear Hear! Yes, I too am a little disappointed that the "zenith" of Free Software seems to be cloning the look and feel of Windows, which is cloning the Mac, etc.

What about some real ground-breaking stuff - how about a marriage of GUI and Unix-y pipe goodness, where you could connect applications together in a GUI and have them do data flow type work - take the Unix filters approach one (or more) steps further?

What about getting RID of the file selector, and just using the normal file views + drag and drop to open and save files? Drag a file to your word processor, and it opens. Drag the tab from the word processor to a disk, and you save. Drag a section of a file, and you save that section. Drag that section to the desktop, and you save a cut buffer, and you can have as many cut buffers as you want.

Hell, why can't I just drag a file to a printer icon to print it? Why do I have to OPEN the file, then print it?

Somebody correct me If I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like you were just describing Plan 9 at the GUI layer.

I believe I remember reading that the desired UI paradigm was that save as worked by opening a window with an icon, what you dragged wherever you wanted the file to be. This was back before tabbed interfaces became common enough that the just dragging the a tab and dropping it resulting in a file made sense. There was no save dialog. equivlently one could just drag the dogument to the printer to print

As for GnuStep, it's a nice try, but once Apple and NeXT merged and the danger of NeXTSTEP vanishing altogether was alleviated, that really took the wind out of GnuStep's sails

I have to disagree with you there. Some of the most active GNUstep developers (both in terms of core development and building on top of GNUstep) joined the project since 2004, after getting their first experience with Cocoa. GNUstep stalled early on due to the the decision by the FSF to pay the makers of Ghostscript to implement a Display PostScript server. They failed, and development of GNUstep's AppKit was held up while waiting for it to finish, then when it was clear that it never would, development

Some of the most active GNUstep developers (both in terms of core development and building on top of GNUstep) joined the project since 2004, after getting their first experience with Cocoa.

When I talk about the wind being taken out of its sails, I'm referring to interest beyond GnuStep's implementors. I think you guys have done some fine work, but the interest among the users just isn't there.

I'm not sure if you still can find it, but I contributed some code to the MiscKit, which was a collection of code for NeXTSTEP developers. If you're developing code on the Mac, you might have some use for the sample code I did when I was at Apple, which I described here. [slashdot.org]

More recently, I posted a couple of little iPhone hacks here [ning.com] and here. [ning.com]

Nothing wrong with being white, male, or rich. The problem with the list is that it claims to be the top "influencers", and I really can't picture anyone asking themselves "gee, what would those guys think?" when deciding how to proceed with any open-source project.